The Quandary of Multiple States as an Internal and External Limit to Marxist Thought: From Poulantzas to Karatani

Abstract

At the time of the disintegration of “actually existing socialism” in the 1990s, it appeared that the inexorable flux of globalization was going to consume the nation-state. However, recent years have witnessed the increasing role of the states in both the Global North and South. The relationship between the state and capital is a frequently traversed subject, but what needs further illumination is the persistence of “many states” and its relation to capitalism as both a national and global formation. While globalization of capital suggests a movement from multiplicity toward a dehistoricized abstraction, a global state has never been actualized. This implies that, unlike capital, the state cannot be dehistoricized or dedifferentiated; therefore, the only way to think about the state is to observe concrete, multiple states. In view of this difference and drawing on Nicos Poulantzas’s and Kōjin Karatani’s inquiries into the states system, this article examines the multi-state system as an internal and external limit to Marxist thought.

Key Words:

• Imperialism
• Kōjin Karatani
• Karl Marx
• Nation-State
• Nicos Poulantzas
• Carl Schmitt

Acknowledgments

Parts of this essay were presented at the Historical Materialism Conference in London, 2016. I would like to thank Morad Farhadpour for his insightful comments on this essay. I would also like to thank the reviewers and editors of Rethinking Marxism.

Notes

1 Paradoxically, some member states of the Security Council are among the very states that have been attacking medical facilities in war zones. See the United Nations Security Council meeting coverage (2016). The location of the cholera treatement center in Yemen had been reported to the Saudi alliance more than 12 times (Trew 2018).

2 As Alain Badiou (2009, 71) puts it: “It is not because there is reaction that there is revolution, it is because there is revolution that there is reaction.”

3 For Marx, there are hybrid forms that are not formally subsumed to capital and are not conditioned by wage labor, though they do fall under the command of capital. Quoting Marx, Tomba (2016, 7; 2015, 81) points out: “Capitalism encounters pre-existing forms of production and it ‘encounters them as antecedents, but not as antecedents established by itself, not as forms of its own life process.’ Capital subsumes and re-configures them in a new framework”). For a rethinking of the category of hybridity beyond its classical connotation in Marx, see Levin (2013).

4 Eurocommunism was built on a political strategy of a democratic road to socialism in the advanced capitalist societies. The right orientation in Eurocommunism was similar to orthodox accounts of state monopoly capitalism. In the second half of the 1970s, Poulantzas was keen on a left Eurocommunism inclined toward both a strategy of left unity and the democratic road to socialism (e.g., a parliamentary majority combined with autonomous movements from below). According to Sotiris, with the benefit of hindsight we can say that “he was overly optimistic about such possibilities … he did not discern how the socialist parties of that period (such as PS in France or PASOK in Greece), in the end, would end up implementing capitalist restructuring from the 1980s onwards” (Sotiris 2018; see also Jessop 1982, 14; Thomas 2011, 283).

5 Although in this brief exposition it may appear that Karatani refers to the state as a form of exchange in the abstract, he indeed analyzes different forms of state, from multiple city-states and chiefdoms to capitalist states.

6 Karatani (2003, 241) goes on to note: “When wages get high domestically, companies transport their factories abroad for cheaper labor. Capital does not choose where and how it gets surplus value. Even in economies based upon industrial capital, the activities of merchant capital coexist omnipresently, including stock exchange and exchange rate. It is this omnipresence of the activities of merchant capital that constantly brings the fluctuating prices closer to the equilibrium. The majority of economists warn today that the speculation of global financial capital is detached from the “substantial” economy. What they overlook, however, is that the substantial economy as such is also driven by illusion” (see also Karatani 2014, 98, 184, 193).

7 For a critique of Karatani in this vein, see Lange (2015, 171–200).

8 Labour and its organization are inextricable from the notion of exchange. Both domination and exploitation must be considered. Regarding value-theory, Karatani (2003, 5–11, 193–251) is eager to separate Marx’s notion from the classical labor theory (particularly the left-Ricardian tendency) by stressing the idea of value-form as the differential relation between commodities, which is to a certain extent derived from the thought of Samuel Bailey.

9 Notice that Poulantzas also stressed the export of capital—apart from commodity—as epitomizing the stage of imperialism. This aspect of the theory of imperialism remains unchanged since Lenin.

10 For Schmitt, proper war is only inter-state war. Therefore, he associated the great achievement of early modern public law in its ability to transpose the general collective violence into a “war in form” (i.e., rationalized, humanized war), taking place among proper states that were bound to certain rules and conventions. For a perceptive criticism of aspects of Schmitt’s view, see Losurdo (2015, 151–55).